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Sunday, 3 July 2011

Some Bourjois for the Summer

I picked up some Bourjois make-up on a 3-for-2 offer in Superdrug on Friday and I’ve had a chance to have a play around with it this weekend so here are some pics and my first impressions.

I wrote in my wish list a couple of months ago that I was looking for a pistachio green eyeshadow and this little round pot from Bourjois seemed like a good candidate. I was also interested in trying one of their new “intense” eyeshadows which claim to offer twice as much coverage in one stroke as their classic eyeshadows and last for up to 16 hours. The packaging is really cute – both eyeshadows come with mirrors in the lids (although they’re so tiny I’m not sure they’re all that useful!) and the little round pot also comes with a sponge tip applicator. The intense eyeshadow is housed in a slightly flatter container and doesn’t include an applicator, but it does have a better fastening mechanism involving a magnet rather than the slightly fiddly click to shut lid of the little round pot. Finally, as there was a 3-for-2 offer I picked up one of their new shades of Effect 3D Gloss from their summer 2011 collection in no. 49. Rose Pacific.

In keeping with its origins as part of a summer collection the lipgloss smells like pina colada, is a pretty shimmery peachy colour and contains SPF 15. The packaging is very sleek and chic and slips into even the smallest of handbags nicely, and I like the brush applicator which allows for precise application. The coverage is very sheer which could be a pro or a con depending on how you like your lipglosses, but I have been a bit disappointed by the thin consistency which is a lot runnier than the other Effect 3D lipglosses I’ve tried in the past, and I found it doesn’t last that long on my lips. It’s also definitely not a cheap choice at £6.99 full price for 5.7ml so I have to say that while I will be using this a lot this summer since I’ve already bought it I won’t be buying this shade again.

OK so now onto the eyeshadows. I was hoping that the intense eyeshadow would be a good alternative for my much-loved but extremely expensive Urban Decay eyeshadow in Midnight Cowboy.

left = Bourjois; right = Urban Decay

I actually preferred the look of the Bourjois shadow on the back of my hand as the glitter particles are much finer than those in Midnight Cowboy, which has quite large chunks of glitter which have an annoying tendency to fall out of the eyeshadow and all over your face. As a result the Bourjois shade looked much more shimmery on my hand. However, from the pics below where you can see the shadow on my eye, the glitter is actually not that noticeable. In fact, it’s barely visible at all! That would be fine if I were looking for a shadow with an extremely subtle glitter effect, but I was looking for a glittery shadow after all. The texture was also quite chalky and gritty to apply so I was a bit disappointed in this shadow as well. I do think it’s a nice peachy colour, and the pigmentation is good, but again at £6.99 full price for just 1g of shadow (Urban Decay single shadows currently retail at around £13.50 for 1.5g making them approx. £9 per gram so only £2 per gram more expensive than Bourjois) I won’t be buying this shadow again.

OK, so moving on to my little round pot perhaps it will be 3rd time lucky for me with Bourjois. I do love this colour, but again the consistency of the product has let me down. The shadow is quite chalky and not very pigmented and I really struggled to get any colour pay off at all when applying it dry (the swatch on my arm was the result of 3 finger swipes), so I decided to try applying it wet. I sprayed a bit of MAC’s Fix+ face spray onto my brush, but that was a disaster – not only did I still struggle to get good colour pay-off, it also resulted in an awful shiny crust on my eyeshadow!

The crust in effect sealed the eyeshadow and meant that I couldn’t get any colour from it at all – the two gashes you can see in the shot above were where I gouged some small chunks of the crust out with my thumb nail to just try to get some colour onto my brush.

I figured I would give the shadow the benefit of the doubt as maybe I shouldn’t have used a face spray to apply the shadow wet and should just have stuck to water instead, so I gave it another go today. In order to release some colour I scored the surface of the shadow using a clean, sharp kitchen knife and applied the shadow to my lids wet, using a brush dampened with water, without any primer underneath. The result was a vibrant green colour which has lasted a good 8 hours on my lids so far.

But just look at the state of my poor eyeshadow now after my having used it just twice:

What a mess! And I’m going to have to score it again before I want to use it again because I’m still not getting decent colour payoff from this surface – basically I was only getting good pay off when I was picking up the loose powder that came away when I created the scores, and now that there’s no loose powder left sitting on the surface I’m back to square one again. I think this colour – when I can get to it – is lovely so I would say that if you liked the colour the shadow is probably worth buying just because I think it’s quite unique, but hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and avoid a crust on your shadow. At £5.99 full price though I expect much better from an eyeshadow and I have to admit that I’ve been quite put off buying any more Bourjois round pots now.

Phew, that was a rare all-round disappointing haul. Hopefully my next post will be written as a happier customer! I’m saving myself now for the release of the Semi-Precious collection from MAC which I believe will be released in the UK next week so hopefully I’ll pick a couple of items up to share on my blog then.